Posts Tagged → Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania Hunters: Army of The Republic
Pennsylvania Hunters: Freedom’s Bulwark
By Josh First
Like it or not, the Obama administration’s failed gun-running scheme, “Fast and Furious,” is viewed by tens of millions of Americans as the tip of the administration’s ice berg aimed at sinking the American tradition of gun ownership.
You’d only be kidding yourself if you stated that the Obama administration supports Second Amendment rights. This administration has done everything it can to hamstring legal gun ownership. Growing up in Central Pennsylvania, where Democrats strenuously, overwhelmingly, even defiantly promoted Second Amendment rights, it saddens me to see the party having lost so much ground on this issue. To tens of millions of Americans, with many regional exceptions across rural Pennsylvania, that political party increasingly represents a direct threat to the greatest Constitutional right we have, the one right that guarantees all the others.
Last week marked the beginning of another two-week Pennsylvania deer hunting season, using firearms, and about 750,000 licensed hunters are afield here during this time, down from a high of over one million twenty years ago.
Every year I am one of these licensed hunters, toting around a Remington 700 BDL in .30-06 in our steep, majestic mountains. It is extremely accurate out to hundreds of yards and it has taken countless deer, and one bear, when called upon at a second’s notice. Its open sights are designed to acquire the target quickly.
Having my rifle across my shoulder, cradled in my arms, slung over my back, clutched in my hand, or at my shoulder, ready to fire, is one of the most natural and comforting feelings I know. Along with my beautiful custom hunting knife made by John Johnson (JRJ knives, in Perry County) and bullet wallet on my belt, and a pack on my back containing food, water, drag rope, and survival essentials, I feel as ready to hunt as Oetzi the Snow Man of the Alps felt the day he died while hunting over 5,000 years ago. As we modern humans are essentially dolled-up Pleistocene hunter-gatherers in fancy clothes, it is as natural a feeling as a human can have. It is who we are at our core, like it or not.
Like many guys out there now, I enjoy hunting alone, stealthily reconnoitering remote cliffs and washes, or with one or two other friends stalking independently of one another, knowing that any of one us could connect with our quarry, or bump them to a buddy. About a zillion years of programming goes into this heightened sense of anticipation and satisfaction when it happens. Until a hundred and fifty years ago, failing to kill a deer meant the family went to sleep hungry, so there should be no surprise that successful hunting evokes the strongest feelings of pride, and happiness. Eating and living to see another day is pretty much the happiest thing a person can do. Today, we just take it for granted, and contract out the inconvenient killing to a hitman, more or less.
However, most of my deer and bear hunting is spent in the company of many friends, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Disaffected. As we move around and across the landscape, carefully coordinating with one another in long lines designed to drive game forward and to stay out of one another’s shooting lanes, I am re-amazed every year at the proficiency with which our guys move across that rough terrain, at the way they safely handle their high powered rifles, at the way that they snap that rifle to their shoulder and kill a far-off deer in only a second or two, before the window of opportunity closes. These folks are shooters, serious, excellent woodsmen. Focused. Formidable. Impressive. I’m proud to be among such company.
These are real men out there, and real women, challenging themselves to succeed in ways that most modern humans have no idea about, sadly. However, there is another group out there that can somewhat relate to how we live during this period, and that is the men and women in combat uniform.
If Pennsylvania hunters were an army, they would be the fifth largest in the world behind China, North Korea, India, Russia and the United States, the last of which has an army only fractionally made of actual shooters. Although I did not receive military training, and although most of my experience with firearms has been rooted in hunting and target shooting, my attitude about my right to own an assortment of firearms is pretty damned militant. And that same attitude is shared among the other 749,999 licensed hunters here, not to mention the other few million Pennsylvanians who stopped hunting years ago but who retain homes full of firearms and bullets. We are a bulwark of freedom, a silent army that need not say anything nor give word to what it represents. Its shadow is faint but long.
In that context, and in the shadow of “Fast and Furious,” one of the thoughts that repeatedly crossed my mind over the past few weeks in our beautiful mountains was, “Mr. Obama, if you want our guns, then come and take ‘em. Really, give it a try, pal.”
It ain’t happening. Our army is bigger than yours.
Pennsylvania’s Two Seasons: Road Construction Season, and Deer Season
Pennsylvania has two seasons, road construction season, and deer season.
Road construction season starts in May and ends in October, while deer season starts in October and ends in January. Four empty months of in-between time are filled with football playoffs and the Super Bowl, and trout season.
The Keystone State’s labyrinthine road system is infamous. Looking at a map of all public roads in the state reveals that there’s barely a square inch of place that is not within a mile of a road. Convenient say some, expensive operations and maintenance say others.
And for deer hunters and others who seek brief periods of solace away from the sounds of men and machines, such proximity to infrastructure is usually frustrating.
Today, for example, I hunted a local farm that I manage. It’s a lovely place, adjoined by about 50,000 acres of public land on either side, so theoretically it is buffered. Hunting there should be a relatively quiet and contemplative affair. Unfortunately, the valley it is in is not so quiet. Endless tires on pavement, whether going to work in the morning or returning in the afternoon, just hearing the quiet, peaceful chirp of a nuthatch or a chickadee takes effort.
It usta be, in the old days, that building roads was the answer to employment problems. Roads were built helter-skelter, without regard for their function, service, or cost. The Casey Highway (To Nowhere) in northeastern Pennsylvania is a prime example. Roads do serve a critical function, but they also cost a hell of a lot to maintain. They impact the open spaces around them, and introduce what were remote deer populations to the hoods of cars across the state. Therefore, it would seem to be a prudent use of limited public funds to focus on fixing the roads we already have instead of building new ones.
Let’s not have road construction create a new deer season for motorists.
Bear season, it’s all about the views
Bear season in Northcentral Pennsylvania came and went this year.
Although no one in our cabin killed a bear, or saw a bear, we all hiked in beautiful country and admired nature’s miracles.
Time alone is rare. Time alone to contemplate God’s creation, the wife, the kids, work…well, it’s hard to make.
In remote areas, sitting on a steep mountainside, no one else within a half mile at least, admiring the views, I was able to center myself.
One of my guests is a Wall Street guy, taking a turn in his career. He said his first time hunting was really about the scenic views. He has traveled the world, but said he never felt so alone, or so at peace as this week. He called it a success.
Bear season, it’s all about the views.
Abandoning the Helm, Here & Afar: How Hypocrisy Has Ended the Moral Claim
Abandoning the Helm, Here & Afar:
How Hypocrisy Has Ended the Moral Claim
© Josh First
July 31, 2011
Time was, for people in need only the local churches helped them. Every frontier town had a church, and its doors were always open to the needy. In a frontier society, the needy are ever-present. Over time, America grew, and seeking America’s promise, the needy increasingly arrived, and the model expanded. Are you hungry, do you need clothes? A local religious group was there to help you or your family. Bethesda Mission, Hebrew Free Loan Association, a myriad of Catholic charities, all served increasingly robust communities and then whole populations of American immigrants from across Europe. Immigrant aid societies flourished, most aimed at their own ethnic or linguistic group.
That model of bare-bones, volunteer-driven organizations advancing and increasingly advocating for the rights, needs, and interests of everyday shlmiel citizens is a uniquely American development. It is something to be proud of. That safety net for newcomers released their potential, increased the opportunity that awaited them, and enhanced their ability to become integrated, productive Americans.
Over decades, mirror image organizations evolved out of more refined social expectations, like human dignity and individual rights, wildlife habitat, environmental protection, and consumer protection. Out of this distinctly private and mostly religiously-based effort came public commissions, bureaucracies, laws, and then government mandates, with increasingly complex goals and symmetrically mixed results. Public health offices aimed at cholera, orphans, and clean water were useful; Prohibition spawned the Mob.
Beating Jim Crow in the South began in the late 1950s, and infused other movements. Responding to the Cold War, international causes became popular in the 1960s, spawning Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, among others.
Increasing public and private financial resources, and increased economic and individual opportunities across America created more defined political jockeying between these safety net groups. Many eventually morphed into highly tuned political machines with sophisticated interest groups, grassroots armies, funders, political backers, friendly media outlets, and crafted messages, many arriving at their final destination and recognizable form in the 1960s and 1970s. Those two decades are also recognizable as the turning point in American public political activism. Gun control, animal rights and welfare, gay rights, etc., all followed, and the laundry list is now long and well known. The political lines are now well drawn in the sand.
What impelled and set the original “founding” interest groups above, apart, and beyond their original surrounding circumstances was a powerful, convening clarion call that coalesced universal conscience: The moral claim.
The moral claim was based on a distinct and publicly recognizable difference between what was common practice at the time, on the one hand, and what was obviously needed to elevate and fairly improve the human condition, on the other hand. The moral claim was a non-partisan standard that appealed to nearly everyone, rallying and focusing fair-minded citizens from across religious, economic, racial and regional boundaries.
One of the most famous examples of the moral claim is King’s I Have a Dream speech. Dead people in coffins have been widely documented to sit up and cry when it’s replayed in their presence, because it is undeniably powerful medicine for a nation designed for freedoms it hadn’t yet delivered.
Similarly, when the Cuyahoga River actually caught on fire, advocates for environmental quality had one hell of a moral claim, and legitimately aimed at ending a long tradition of egregious pollution that privatized profits and socialized the costs. Three decades later, River Keeper was shutting down the last industrial pipes bleeding privately conjured PCBs and other chartreuse-colored ooze into the Hudson River’s very public waters.
But times change, and thankfully, the vast majority of the moral claims have been settled (more on this later, obviously). The problem is that the well-oiled machines that got those moral claims over the goal line are still running on high octane, and they have to keep going, or die. So they stay in the groove that worked for them, well worn over decades, and the growing differences between their goals, methods, and reality is now making hypocrites out of many of these the now-former bearers of the now-former moral claim. Hypocrites do not make good standard bearers.
For example, here in Pennsylvania this past January, purported environmental activists (self-appointed keepers of the green moral claim) banged drums and shouted into bull horns, doing everything possible to disrupt Governor Tom Corbett’s inaugural speech, occurring three hundred feet away. What was the issue that impelled them into their most moral rage? Why, it was the very most moral issue of natural gas drilling. And not just any gas drilling, but hydrofracturing deep gas wells. You’d think from their behavior that gas drilling is a moral issue found directly in the Constitution and the Bible, or that terrible crimes are occurring.
But it’s not a moral issue. Gas drilling is an every-day issue like plastics or peanut butter, arising from modern social needs, demands, and industrial processes that environmental activists themselves help perpetuate in their individual daily lives. It is subject to scientific analysis, assessments of risk-benefit tradeoffs, and regulations, both sufficient and insufficient. It is not a matter of principle.
But once Tom Corbett became governor, within his first two minutes and thirty-eight seconds, as a matter of fact, the activists turned gas drilling into an artificially manufactured issue of principle. Invoking the moral claim, protestors complained that the new Corbett administration, in office for exactly two minutes and thirty eight seconds, was environmentally immoral.
Uhhh, where were these folks during the eight-year tenure of the immediate past governor, Ed Rendell? You know, the same governor who handed out gas drilling and hydrofracking permits like they were potato chips, for years before Corbett was even a candidate? Rendell got a free pass from these purported keepers of the flame, apparently because he was of a political party that the activists otherwise generally concur with. Holding Corbett accountable for something he hasn’t yet done, while giving a free pass to Rendell who done a lot, makes them partisan, makes the gas drilling issue partisan, employs a double standard, makes the activists hypocrites, which terminates their moral claim.
Looking farther abroad, international human rights groups were once the only lifeline of political prisoners in Soviet, Socialist, and authoritarian gulags around the world. Today, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch disproportionately criticize democratic countries where press freedoms, free movement, and economic comforts make it easy to get access to friendly advocates and information, like Israel and America. And they ignore egregious violations among the harder targets, like Saudi Arabia’s all-encompassing barbarism and summary executions, China’s crushing occupation of Tibet, Iran and Syria’s mass executions of peaceful protestors, and Turkey’s ongoing genocide against the Kurds.
Saudi Arabia, that epitome of cruelty, barbarism, discrimination, lacking basic human freedoms and rights, in fact, has recently become the actual benefactor of Human Rights Watch, and thereby bought off the group. Getting access to authoritarian countries is hard, and if the masters of all things human rights play hardball with authoritarian regimes, they get tossed out. So they withhold full criticism, and instead criticize the enemies of the worst brutes, just to keep the machine running. And they take the brutes’ money, too.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations and other supposed watchdog groups, are now such giant hypocrites that their misdeeds have spawned watchdog groups to hold them, the self-appointed human rights organizations, accountable to their own purported standards. Groups like NGO Monitor (www.ngo-monitor.org) and UN Watch (www.unwatch.org), which is “tasked with measuring the UN by the yardstick of its own charter,” are playing backup to maintaining the moral claim, and not allowing it to be watered down in the name of convenient politics.
Internationally, certain pet issues predominate, monopolizing press exposure and the supposed moral claim. Despite a nearly two-to-one ratio of Jewish refugees from Jerusalem, Hebron, and Arab and Muslim countries, versus the number of Arab refugees from Israel in the same time period, today we hear only, hypocritically, about the Arabs. Compensating Jewish refugees, whose farms, homes, religious sites, and businesses remain under Arab colonialist occupation, is not a vogue subject. It’s still not vogue in Poland, either, by the way, another mass event held at the same time.
Similarly, Turkey’s still-smoldering genocide against the Armenians, its ethnic cleansing of the Kurds, its brutal occupation of Cyprus complete with an Islamic Apartheid wall, and its officialization of Islamic imperialism all get no media juice. Being a NATO member has its benefits, I suppose, but where oh where is the moral claim? Hypocrites all, the Human Rights Watches of the world. They are focused on tiny, democratic Israel.
In conclusion, if someone abdicates their self-appointed role and abandons the helm, which had been based on a universal standard, and instead becomes a hypocrite, then their moral claim has been badly cheapened or lost. Since the beginning of modern social activism, based on the early faith-based model, public deference was automatically given to those who made the moral claim, who rallied us around a universal conscience. No longer. We are in the beginning of a historic shift of moral authority away from the partisan establishment grievance groups and back into the hands of wired up, dialed-in citizens, whose blogs aggregate and focus public wrath on the official failure du jure. Tunisia one day, British Petroleum the next. Shifting and diffusing power back into the public venue is an inevitable and necessary cog in the evolution of social activism. Who knows what beautiful things will come out of it? Thankfully, hypocrisy won’t be one of those things, because it doesn’t pass the public’s sniff test.
Originally published by and licensed to www.rockthecapital.com
PA-17th Cong. District Update
Many supporters of my 2009-2010 Republican campaign for the PA-17th Congressional District are asking what my plans are. Will I run for Congress again?
My answer is that I’d like to run again, but it depends on what the PA-17th looks like after redistricting. That process is happening now and several reports have the district as we have known it divided up into several different pieces. Harrisburg, where I reside, may end up in Congressman Platts’s district, while Dauphin County is further divided among other current members of Congress.
Until the proposed plan is unveiled, I can’t give a complete answer. In 2010 our election results were an impressive 24%, out of four candidates, on just $11,000. Our amazing volunteers, like Carl Fox, made that difference.
So please check back here soon. I hope to have an answer shortly. And thank you for all your encouragement and support!
Wishing you a glorious Independence Day holiday,
Josh
California Pulls a High Tech ‘Yosemite Sam’ Move
Yosemite Sam is, or was, a colorful rootin’ tootin’ California cowboy created by Warner Brothers Cartoons. Based on the ’49er image of a rough ‘n ready gunslinger, Yosemite Sam occasionally shot himself in the foot while Bugs Bunny casually outwitted him. Testing brains versus brawn, these classic cartoons lampooned trigger happy meat heads and, as always, elevated the higher valued brain power of the waskilly rabbit (rascally rabbit, as pronounced by another trigger happy meat head, Elmer Fudd). Using that proven Hollywood method of powerful if subliminal suggestion, the cartoons’ message was clear to impressionable little kids and meat heads alike: Use your head, you’ll do better.
Fast forward 70 years to the home of Yosemite, the supposedly golden state of California. Yesterday, that Liberal-laden welfare state signed into law a new tax on Internet sales. Because interstate commerce is constitutionally protected above individual states’ financial interests, taxes on Internet sales aren’t really legal or legit. Most consumers take some risk when they purchase online, and the absence of state taxes (a huge 8.75% in California), is an overall small but relatively large reward for taking that risk. Returning items by mail costs buyers money, and not paying sales tax offsets those costs.
Well, here we are, many decades after California became one of America’s premier economies, and the elected officials of that once-great state have decided to return to the 1700s way of doing business rather than embrace technology, mobile consumers, and the blurring of boundaries everywhere (like they enjoy the blurred boundary between California and Mexico, a blur long sought and much enjoyed by Liberals everywhere). Rather than leveraging technology to work for California, in this instance, California Democrats choose to take the one-dimensional approach to gathering revenue. Taxing Internet sales was projected to gather about $200 million annually, but with amazon.com and other big Internet sellers immediately ending their high-tech advertising relationships there, the state is now projected to lose about $135 million in taxes paid by the owners of those advertising businesses. And because many of those owners have said that they will now relocate to a nearby state without Internet sales tax, California loses those tax payers as well as the creative brain power that those entrepreneurs brought to the state.
Like all mis-named “progressives,” Liberals are ultimately interested in just one thing, and that is power. Like Yosemite Sam of old, the California Democrats behind this foolish move understand power alone, and by golly, they will exercise power simply because they can. For the simple sake of having it and demonstrating to all around that they have it. But like Yosemite Sam, California has shot itself in the foot. The net result of their Internet tax appears to be just about a complete wash, with the added loss of yet more smart working people from the state.
Like their ideological counterparts in North Korea and China and Russia, California’s Democrats are most satisfied to exercise power for power’s sake, regardless of the collateral damage. Shooting themselves in the foot never felt so good, except for the entrepreneurs and remaining taxpayer left behind in the growing exodus of brain power leaving that Statist state.
Hopefully, my own home state of Pennsylvania, also long a haven for high taxes and unfavorable business conditions, will find a way to take advantage of the Yosemite Sams now running California government, and funnel their loss into Pennsylvania and make it our gain.